rough
avenues of reeds and water-plants, from reach to reach, from pool to
pool. Here we had a glimpse of the wide-watered valley rich in grass,
here of silent woods, up-piled in the distance, over which quivered the
hot summer air. Here a herd of cattle stood knee-deep in the shallow
water, lazily twitching their tails and snuffing at the stream. The
birds were silent now in the glowing noon; only the reeds shivered and
bowed. There, beside a lock with its big, battered timbers, the water
poured green and translucent through a half-shut sluice. Now and then
the springs of thought brimmed over in a few quiet words, that came and
passed like a breaking bubble--but for the most part we were silent,
content to converse with nod or smile. And so we came at last to our
goal; a house embowered in leaves, a churchyard beside the water, and
a church that seemed to have almost crept to the brink to see itself
mirrored in the stream. The place mortals call Hemingford Grey, but
it had a new name for me that day which I cannot even spell--for the
perennial difficulty that survives a hundred disenchantments, is to
feel that a romantic hamlet seen thus on a day of pilgrimage, with its
clustering roofs and chimneys, its waterside lawns, is a real place at
all. I suppose that people there live dull and simple lives enough,
buy and sell, gossip and back-bite, wed and die; but for the pilgrim it
seems an enchanted place, where there can be no care or sorrow, nothing
hard, or unlovely, or unclean, but a sort of fairy-land, where men seem
to be living the true and beautiful life of the soul, of which we are
always in search, but which seems to be so strangely hidden away. It
must have been for me and my friend that the wise and kindly artist
who lives there in a paradise of flowers had filled his trellises with
climbing roses, and bidden the tall larkspurs raise their azure spires
in the air. How else had he brought it all to such perfection for that
golden hour? Perhaps he did not even guess that he had done it all for
my sake, which made it so much more gracious a gift. And then we learned
too from a little red-bound volume which I had thought before was a
guide-book, but which turned out to-day to be a volume of the Book of
Life, that the whole place was alive with the calling of old voices. At
the little church there across the meadows the portly, tender-hearted,
generous Charles James Fox had wedded his bride. Here, in the pool
below,